A recipe for Kafka

Is That Kafka?: 99 finds, which sounds perhaps like warmed-up leftovers from Reiner Stach’s monumental and definitive three-volume biography of Kafka (which Shelley Frisch has translated into English), is nothing of the kind. Actually, it’s more like a fascinating recipe book, from which the reader may improvise or enrich his or her own Kafka. Long into the age of the automatic biography – though not all of them are as judicious, as devoted, or as brilliant as Stach’s – it is interesting to consider whether a different, less autonomous form may not in the end be more helpful, and more in the interests of writers and readers.

It is a small miracle of organization and coverage (simultaneously thematic and chronological); while the pleasures of space and bittiness do not take away from range. It walks the line from responsibility to ho-hum. Its contents vary from the inconsequential (to which one might react with the speech-cloud interrobangs and sweaty droplets of Hergé’s Tintin, or the “ – ” with which Malcolm Lowry registered silent bemusement) to the clinching; the expected to the astounding; the dry “ohne Kommentar” to the learnedly footnoted. It is mobile, suggestive and free. There are on the one hand crowd photographs, with a “Where’s Wally”-style “Is that Kafka?” and the close-up of a single, blurred, circled head in the seething mass; and there are, on the other, comprehensive canvassings of Kafka’s views on such things as doctors (very much against, though Stach also notes that he was a “cooperative patient”) and beer (surprisingly, perhaps, very much in favour). To Stach, after the 777 of the biography, it must have felt like flying a kite.

Since his discovery or global reinvention seventy or eighty years ago, our picture of Kafka has been fleshed out more than would once have seemed possible. The “quintessential archetype of the writer as a sort of alien: unworldly, neurotic, introverted, sick”, as Stach describes the old image (a sort of negative Rilke), was a long time ago now. Hence the joy of identifying Kafka (probably!) in a crowd scene in Merano; or, like Max Brod and everyone else, standing on his chair at an air show in Brescia. Or of turning up Brod’s mock-questionnaire on which Kafka obligingly detailed his weight, weight gain and general state of health. Through the pioneering and endlessly painstaking work of Hartmut Binder, Klaus Wagenbach, Stach and others, we have a physical and circumstantial Kafka who is not the gloomy, self-entrapped, religiose wretch of yore. We knew he was something of a dandy, did Swedish exercises, was a devotee of Quaker Oats and loved the prankish silent cinema. Here now are things to set beside these. He was attentive and sympathetic to little girls, read popular travel books, admired expressions of physical prowess – was, in Auden’s phrase, silly like us. And when Stach includes a piece called “What Color Were Kafka’s Eyes” and quotes four versions (dark, grey, blue and brown) from a dozen impassioned observers, all categorical, all sure of themselves, we know enough other things about him to be comforted, and to be able to say to ourselves, pace Thomas Hardy: here was someone of whom such things were not noticed, as indeed a discretion about the conduct of his life and a dislike of fuss about his person seem to me properly “Kafkaesque”.

Some of Stach’s exhibits, quite deliberately, don’t take one very far: and why not, the biographer has every right to be demob-happy. They are like shining a torch round a dead end. Nothing there. That a man of the same name lived for a time in Berlin. That one Joseph Kafka – a handicapped worker – provoked an armed incident, ultimately involving the police, in the premises of what was subsequently to be Kafka’s employer, the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Prague. That a little girl to whom Kafka showed some kindness, the daughter of a Berlin landlady, lived to be a hundred years old.

Another category of things are plainly inevitable and indispensable: Kafka’s school report card (no subject “outstanding”, but plenty of “satisfactorys”); the press release that accompanied his first book, Contemplation (1913); the title page of the last whose publication he witnessed (Ein Landarzt, 1920), with his proofing marks on it. His (probable) desk, with his riotous description of it in terms of a rowdy theatre. The floor plan of his parents’ apartment in Prague, and the few slight alterations that made it the Samsas’ in Metamorphosis. A page of the first translation made from Kafka: Milena Jesenska’s version of “The Stoker” in a Czech literary magazine of 1920. The same author’s short-order but justly and levelly heroic obituary of Kafka, written hours after his death on June 3, 1924:

He was too clear-sighted, too wise to live, and too weak to fight: but his was the weakness of noble, beautiful people, who are incapable of fighting against fear, against misunderstandings, unkindness and intellectual falsehoods, who are aware of their own powerlessness from the beginning, who submit to it, and in so doing, cast shame upon the victor.

And then there are the things that fascinatingly and inexhaustibly bespeak their maker. Because truly, the “Kafka” goes through his every utterance and expression like the letters in a stick of rock. The fusion of intense curiosity (the peeled senses of adolescence, someone said: Kafka was thirty) and nausea in the comprehensive carnality of this piece of description of a fellow traveller, written apparently from memory several days later:

Obsessive craving for food and drink. Slurping the hot soup, biting into the end of a salami without removing the skin and licking it at the same time, earnestly sipping warm beer, sweat breaking out around his nose. So repulsive that it is impossible to get your fill, no matter how voraciously you look and smell.

For all the symphonic and pan-sensual richness of the description – the grotesquely comedic biting and licking, the sensitivity to temperature, the fluids, the awareness of the other man’s pores – there is enough left of Kafka to create the recessional of his own insatiability, looking on.

Or take the strange episode in 1915 when, as Stach relates, the writer Franz Blei awarded the Fontane Prize for the Best Modern Fiction Writer “to his wealthy friend Carl Sternheim, but publicly requested that he pass on the 800 marks in prize money to Kafka”. Sternheim agreed, Metamorphosis (of all things) was rushed into print to take advantage of the publicity, and the publisher’s editor, one Georg Heinrich Meyer, duly congratulated the lucky author on cashing in twice. Kafka, meanwhile, so Stach, “had imagined his first public honor a bit differently”. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was offended. He had easily the acuity to pick the humiliation out of the distinction. (We are nowadays all at sea in such situations: do we feel big or small, “proud” or “humbled”?) For Kafka, it was all the talk of money, to the exclusion of everything else, combined with the fact that he had heard nothing directly from Sternheim himself. Stach finishes the story:

Kafka had to be persuaded to take the money, and when he dutifully wrote to his benefactor to express his thanks, his reluctance was manifest. He wrote to Meyer: “It is not easy to write to someone from whom one has not heard directly, and thank him without quite knowing what for”.

This is too perfect. No obstruction is created, the whole thing grinds on, and yet the mildest and most exquisite complaint is lodged, from first principles, and at the address of the person who has most (and least thinkingly) advanced the entire weird and ultimately dirty process: Meyer. The punctilio here, the effort and the sweetness are so entirely and inimitably Kafka. (Stach elsewhere speaks aptly of “his characteristic combination of courtesy, sympathy, and curiosity”.)

Or take Kafka’s account, during one of his two visits to Paris, of a traffic accident: an early-model automobile has rammed a commercial tricycle. Three pages into a wonderfully detailed soufflé of a description, the law takes a hand:

With the clumsiness of a construction worker, the policeman pulls an old, dirty, but blank sheet of paper out of his notebook, notes the names of the concerned parties, writes down the name of the bakery, and in order to be precise, walks around the tricycle while writing.

How everything in this brutal process quivers. The policeman is clumsy but strives for precision; his page is dirty but blank; he covers all the angles, but his writing is done on the hoof.